“Justice Week” on Covenant Eyes Radio – Episode 111

All this week we are exploring the issue of sex trafficking, hearing the stories of ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things to combat this evil around the world.

In the sex trafficking market, three important factors must be recognized: supply, distribution, and demand.

Feeding the supply side are all the trafficked victims, the women and children who are exploited for sex.

The distribution side is made up of the traffickers: the recruiters, transporters, harborers, and pimps.

But on the demand side are the thousands of men willing to purchase sex, driving the market for sex tourism and sex slavery.

Today we are speaking with Laura Lederer, the Vice President of Global Centurion, a non-profit organization dedicated to eradicating sex slavery by focusing on the demand side of the equation. Ms. Lederer is one of the foremost authorities on human trafficking. In the 1990s she founded The Protection Project at Harvard University, a research institute dedicated to tracking and combating human trafficking. From 2001 to 2009, she was the Executive Director of the Senior Policy Operating Group on Trafficking in Persons, a high-level interagency group that staffed the President’s cabinet-level Task Force on Trafficking in Persons.

Today Ms. Lederer talks about her early research in the anti-pornography movement in the 1970s informs what she knows today about the demand side of sex trafficking.

Today’s interview is conducted by Christie Arnold, an intern with pureHOPE.